What Does 40 Years of Waiting Do to a Place?

Zionsville, Indiana is a suburb northwest of Indianapolis. It is the kind of place people move to for the schools, the quiet, the feeling that the ground beneath their feet is solid and safe. It is the kind of place where someone builds a life and expects it to stay built.

Somewhere beneath that ground, for at least four decades, hazardous substances have been moving. Through the soil. Through the water table. South. Always south, toward more of the community, more of the people who never signed anything and never agreed to any of this.

The corporations who created this mess signed their names in 1991. There were approximately 235 of them. They agreed, in a federal court order, to fix what they broke. And then the years passed. The 1990s passed. The 2000s passed. The soil vapor extraction system they installed was declared a failure in 2003. The replacement technology installed in 2008 was declared inadequate by 2011. Active cleanup was suspended in 2012 while engineers puzzled over why rainwater kept flooding the contaminated trenches. The 2010s passed. A new amendment was filed in 2016. The 2020s arrived.

A draft analysis of alternative remedies was submitted in November 2020. Comments came back from the EPA and the state. By January 2025, those comments still had not been fully addressed. The 2025 court filing gives the defendants 90 days from filing to submit a revised draft in response to comments that are at least four years old.

Think about what 40 years means in a human life. A child born the year the lawsuit was filed in 1983 is now in their early 40s. They grew up near this site. They may have had children who grew up near this site. Two generations have lived with the knowledge, or the ignorance, of what was happening underground. Two generations of people who drank water, played outside, and trusted that someone with authority was handling it.

The corporations did not go away. They are still there, still “settling,” still submitting workplans and responding to comments and requesting approvals. The bureaucratic machinery has been running this whole time. It just has not been producing a clean site. What it has produced is document after document after document, each one a monument to the gap between corporate accountability on paper and corporate accountability in practice.

There is no dramatic villain in this story. There is no single executive who laughed and said “never.” What there is, instead, is something more ordinary and therefore more enraging: a system where 235 companies can collectively agree to clean something up, collectively implement solutions that do not work, collectively negotiate new solutions, and collectively delay for so long that an entirely new generation of lawyers has to be brought in to explain to a federal judge what was supposed to happen in 1991.

Meanwhile, the contamination does not negotiate. It does not wait for approvals. It moves with the groundwater, south, toward people who had nothing to do with any of this.

Straight from the Court Documents

These are direct quotes from the January 16, 2025 court filing, Case 1:83-cv-01419-LJM-MJD. Nothing has been paraphrased. Read what was admitted in federal court.

“on September 10, 1991, this Court entered a Consent Decree executed by the United States of America on behalf of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (‘EPA’), the State of Indiana (the ‘State’), and approximately 235 defendants in this action. The Consent Decree required defendants to implement the remedy for hazardous substance contamination at the Environmental Conservation and Chemical Corporation Superfund Site (hereinafter, the ‘ECC Site’ or the ‘Site’) near Zionsville, Indiana.”

• This confirms the original 1991 agreement involved approximately 235 separate corporate defendants. This is not a single rogue company; it is a coalition of businesses that collectively contaminated a site and collectively agreed to fix it.
• The document was filed January 16, 2025, meaning this Consent Decree is now 34 years old and still being amended.

“in March 2003, EPA determined, after consultation with the State, that the remedial action had not achieved the requisite cleanup standards”

• This is the federal government officially declaring that the primary cleanup method failed. The SVE system ran for over a decade and did not work.
• The 2003 failure declaration triggered “Additional Work” provisions. That additional work has now itself required multiple rounds of revision, delay, and amendment.

“in 2005, the Parties notified this Court that: (1) the SVE remedy failed to meet cleanup standards, so that the Additional Work set forth in the 1998 Revised Exhibit A was triggered; and (2) the Parties expected to develop agreed modifications to the Additional Work”

• Notice the gap: EPA confirmed failure in 2003, but the parties did not notify the court until 2005. Two years passed before the court was officially told the primary remedy had not worked.
• The phrase “expected to develop agreed modifications” signals that even in 2005, the parties were still in planning mode rather than action mode.

“sometime after the ESD was issued in 2006, negotiations to amend the Consent Decree stalled, the Parties never reached full agreement on Attachment Z-1 nor a Consent Decree amendment, and those documents were never finalized to lodge with this Court”

• This is an admission that the legal framework for the 2006 remedy changes was never properly completed. The parties simply proceeded without finalizing the governing legal documents.
• This means that for years after 2006, cleanup work was being conducted under an informal understanding rather than an enforceable court-approved plan.

“after installation of the PRGS in 2008, the Parties determined around 2011 that the PRGS system was not adequate and that the operation of the PRGS and the dual phase SVE system was being adversely affected by, among others, the larger volumes of water than expected in the trench system after precipitation events”

• The PRGS installed in 2008 was found inadequate within three years. That is a second major technology failure at the same site.
• The stated cause, too much rainwater in the trenches, is a basic site hydrology problem. It is notable that this was not anticipated before the system was built.

“The Settling Defendants have paid to the State $37,842.41 in full settlement of the claims of the State for its oversight costs paid or incurred at the Site prior to January 1, 2009.”

• This covers the State of Indiana’s oversight costs from the beginning of the case through January 1, 2009, a span of at least 18 years (1991 to 2009, plus prior pre-decree costs). $37,842.41 is the total compensation the State received for nearly two decades of regulatory oversight work.
• For scale: $37,842.41 is approximately the annual starting salary of a single junior state environmental employee. The companies that created this mess paid Indiana that amount in total to cover 18 or more years of government supervision of their failed cleanup.

• This is the sentence that confirms the contamination has grown beyond its original boundary. By 2016, the plume was documented moving south, outside the original site perimeter, toward new areas of community and groundwater.
• The phrase “recently been detected” does not mean the migration recently started. It means regulators recently confirmed what may have been happening for years.

Who Pays When Corporations Don’t Clean Up

Public Health

Hazardous substance contamination at a Superfund site is not a contained inconvenience. It is a long-term health risk to anyone whose water, soil, or air is affected. The ECC site’s documented failures make that risk real and ongoing.

• The site contains hazardous substances serious enough to require a CERCLA Superfund designation, the federal government’s highest-priority category for contaminated sites. The specific chemicals are identified in the technical work plans referenced in the 2025 filing but not disclosed in the public court document itself; however, CERCLA designation means the contamination was deemed an imminent and substantial danger to public health or the environment.
• Contamination has been confirmed migrating south of the original site boundary by 2016. The people living, working, or using water sources in that southern corridor are now within an expanding contamination zone. New extraction wells south of the site are only now being ordered as part of the 2025 amendment, meaning uncontrolled southward migration has been occurring for at least nine years since it was first documented.
• Active cleanup was suspended in 2012 and not fully resumed for years. During that period, contaminated water was allowed to collect passively and flow by gravity to an on-site sump, with treatment before discharge. This passive approach meant no active removal of contaminants from the subsurface for an extended period.
• The 2025 filing requires quarterly groundwater monitoring from all wells, with the possibility of dropping to semi-annual sampling only after EPA’s review in a future Five-Year Review process. The fact that EPA requires quarterly sampling underscores that contamination levels are still a live concern, not a historical footnote.
• The requirement for a revised Remedial Alternatives Analysis means that after 40 years, the responsible parties still do not have a finalized long-term remediation plan. The community around this site continues to live with an open-ended contamination problem while corporate and government parties negotiate what to do about it.

Economic Inequality

The financial structure of this case reflects a persistent pattern in American environmental law: the costs of corporate contamination are distributed widely across taxpayers, regulators, and communities, while the companies responsible retain maximum negotiating leverage.

• The State of Indiana expended oversight resources across at least 18 years of monitoring and enforcement activity (from case inception through January 1, 2009) and was compensated $37,842.41 in total. That is approximately $2,100 per year of state government time and labor, covering the work of environmental engineers, lawyers, and regulators who tracked this case through multiple failed remediation attempts. Indiana taxpayers effectively subsidized the gap.
• The 2025 amendment caps the government’s oversight cost recovery at $850,000 for certain earlier periods. This ceiling on reimbursement means the federal government absorbed oversight costs above that threshold, costs paid by taxpayers rather than the corporations whose contamination triggered the oversight in the first place.
• The penalty structure for delay, $1,500 per day for the first seven days, scaling to $9,000 per day after 60 days, is structured in a way that rewards early partial compliance. For large corporations sharing liability across approximately 235 defendants, the per-defendant cost of even the maximum daily penalty is negligible relative to the cost of full remediation, creating a financial incentive structure that does not strongly penalize delay.
• Community members living near the site bear health monitoring costs, potential property devaluation, and the psychological burden of proximity to a known contamination zone. None of these costs appear in the consent decree’s financial accounting. They are externalities absorbed by individuals who had no say in any of the negotiations.
• The site has now consumed decades of federal and state legal resources: DOJ trial attorneys, EPA engineers and regional staff, IDEM oversight personnel, and multiple rounds of federal court proceedings. That institutional cost, borne by taxpayers, represents a massive subsidy to the corporations that created the contamination in the first place.

What Indiana Got for 18 Years of Work

How to Push Back on 40 Years of Foot-Dragging

The corporations named in this case have been operating under a consent decree since 1991. That decree is now public record, the court filings are public record, and the regulatory contacts are all listed below. Use them.

Who Is Accountable

The 2025 filing does not name individual corporate executives in the public document. The responsible parties are referred to collectively as “Settling Defendants,” described only as “The Environmental Conservation and Chemical Corporation, et al.” — approximately 235 entities. The following roles and agencies are confirmed in the source material:

• Douglas Ballotti, Director, Superfund and Emergency Management Division, U.S. EPA Region 5, signed the January 2025 amendment on behalf of EPA.
• Amanda Urban, Associate Regional Counsel, U.S. EPA Region 5, signed on behalf of EPA legal counsel. EPA Region 5’s office is at 77 West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 60604.
• Bonnie A. Cosgrove, Trial Attorney, Environmental Enforcement Section, Environment and Natural Resources Division, U.S. Department of Justice, signed on behalf of the United States. Contact: 450 Golden Gate Ave., Ste. 07-6714, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 744-0130.
• The Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) is the State co-plaintiff. IDEM site reference number for this case: 7500014. Payment and correspondence address: IDEM, P.O. Box 3295, Indianapolis, Indiana 46206-3295.

Watchlist: Agencies That Can Act

• U.S. EPA Region 5: The regional office has direct authority over this site and signed the 2025 amendment. Contact them to request Five-Year Review reports, monitoring data, and the complete list of Settling Defendants, which is not disclosed in the public filing.
• U.S. Department of Justice, Environmental Enforcement Section: The DOJ is the federal plaintiff. They can pursue enforcement action if milestone deadlines established in the 2025 amendment are missed. Track whether penalty provisions are actually triggered when deadlines pass.
• Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM): The State co-plaintiff. IDEM has its own enforcement authority and is named in all consultations on EPA remediation decisions at this site. Request their records on oversight costs and monitoring reports under Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act.
• U.S. EPA Superfund Program (national): The ECC Site is listed in the National Priorities List. The EPA’s Superfund site profile page includes publicly accessible records on remedial progress. Search by CERCLA Site ID and request Five-Year Review documents.

What You Can Do Right Now

• File a public records request with IDEM under Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act (IC 5-14-3) for all monitoring reports, inspection records, and correspondence related to IDEM site number 7500014. You are entitled to this information.
• Request the full list of approximately 235 Settling Defendants from the court docket at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Case 1:83-cv-01419-LJM-MJD. Court records are public. PACER (pacer.gov) provides electronic access to federal court dockets.
• Contact Boone County environmental and community health organizations based in Zionsville and the surrounding area to connect residents near the site with the legal resources and monitoring data they are entitled to access.
• Track the 90-day deadline from January 16, 2025 for submission of the Revised Remedial Alternatives Analysis Report. That deadline falls on approximately April 16, 2025. If no filing is made, the penalty provisions in Section XVII.A.2 of the amended decree are triggered. Notify DOJ and EPA if this deadline passes without a submission.
• Support organizations that do free legal and technical assistance for communities near Superfund sites, including Earthjustice, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ), and the Environmental Defense Fund’s community advocacy programs.
• Share the full text of the 2025 court filing with local Zionsville and Boone County media. Local reporters covering this community deserve to know that a federal lawsuit from 1983 is still being litigated, with contamination still migrating, in 2025.